Ticket tug-of-war
Tickets for Mariah Carey's fall concert go on sale today at 2 p.m., but many of the best seats are already gone. The first crack at the 14,000 or so seats available for the Sept. 25 show has been given to Calgary Flames season ticket holders, corporate sponsors of The Adventures of Mimi world tour, fan clubs, radio stations, record labels and, yes, even the media. Industry representatives won't reveal exactly how many tickets are sold under such arrangements, but some say that could account for close to 20 per cent of total seats, including some of the best ones in the house.
In what is shaping up to be a strong fall concert season for Calgary, including shows by Elton John, the Dixie Chicks and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the chances of getting good seats to some of the hottest acts is getting slimmer, which means there are going to be a lot of disappointed fans.
"Largely because of the increasing number of pre-sales to fan clubs or American Express cardholders or whoever, the actual number of tickets sold to the general public is less than you would have seen five or 10 years ago," says Gary Bongiovanni, editor of concert publication Pollstar. "It has been a diminishing number."
For Elton John's upcoming show, scheduled at the Saddledome on Sept. 29, tickets go on sale to the general public on Monday, but Flames season ticket holders and House of Blues members have been able to buy tickets all week. The tickets allotted to those promotions were sold out midway through the week, although nobody would reveal exactly how many that was.
Libby Raines, spokeswoman for the Pengrowth Saddledome where Carey will perform, says most concerts have a pre-set number of seats kept out of sales to the public, but that is usually determined by the promoter. "Some shows provide pre-purchase opportunity to fan clubs," she says, "and in some cases, they will work with the building for building clients such as season ticket holders. But it varies. Typically, most shows allow for the majority of tickets to be sold through the public sale."
But even the diminishing number available for public sale are becoming more difficult to come buy, thanks mostly to technology. Because of the ability to purchase tickets on the Internet, on the phone and at retail locations, concerts for hot tickets such as George Strait, U2, Coldplay and the Red Hot Chili Peppers tend to sell out in the time it takes to listen to one of their songs.
Calgarians were in an uproar when tickets for the Rolling Stones concert last year were made scarce after season ticket holders, corporate sponsors and fan club members (who paid $100 US to join the club) had snapped up the best seats before the public sale even began. Although the Saddledome claimed 14,000 seats were available for that Oct. 28 show, many readers sent letters to The Herald claiming they were told all tickets were sold out the minute the box office opened.
"I was on the Internet at exactly the time the tickets went on sale to the public and there was not a ticket to be had," said Calgarian Glenna Besse. "Is this going to be the status quo for concert tickets in Calgary? Flames season ticket holders will always have priority? I sure hope not. This marketing tactic by the Saddledome management is a slap in the face to Calgarians."
Raines defends the policy of giving Flames ticket holders first crack at concert seats. "We think it's a fair policy," she says. "It's an arrangement made with the promoter and the band management." There are also a number of other promotions and giveaways that push the general public further back in line. For the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert on Sept. 16 at the Saddledome, for example, special codes were given away through an iTunes promotion. People who purchased the band's latest album through that online music service could purchase seats four days before they went on sale to the public. That show was sold out shortly after going on sale.
Also making it tougher to land seats is ticket scalping, which is not illegal in Canada, as it is in the U.S. In the U.S., it's estimated scalpers and ticket brokers - many of whom employ computer hackers to purchase quality seats they can resell at a premium - account for half of the $3 billion revenue of the annual concert business.
"To be honest with you, I hate scalpers," says Shane Bourbonnais, executive vice-president for Clear Channel Entertainment, North America's biggest concert promotion company. "I sit in my office and work my ass off, put Clear Channel's money on the line and book a show, and a scalper can go and buy a ticket on the back of my hard work and profit from it? It pisses me off."
There are several online businesses that exist solely to purchase tickets and resell them at raised prices. Ticket brokers StubHub and RazorGator do nothing but resell tickets, charging both sellers and buyers service fees. For instance, although tickets for last year's Rolling Stones show in Calgary this past fall were being sold between $60 and $350 at Ticketmaster, sites such as Showmetickets.com were selling them for as much as $2,000 for a front-row seat.
To combat this gross inflation while absorbing some of its benefits, Ticketmaster has now convinced several prominent artists such as Bon Jovi, Coldplay, Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to conduct ticket auctions, or what the company calls "dynamic pricing". In this system of timed auctions, interested consumers go online and bid on tickets, which are priced higher than face value at the start of the auction. The money is then split between the artist and the promoter, with Ticketmaster taking a service fee.
"This helps keep tickets out of the unauthorized, secondary markets where (another company) determines how much the consumer is going to pay," explains Ticketmaster spokeswoman Bonnie Poindexter. "This way, fans decide." Bongiovanni says Ticketmaster has had the auction software for years, but artists have been reluctant to use it out of fear it will be perceived as greedy.
"The hesitancy is, some people may look at that as gross profiteering, so in order to blunt that criticism, most of the auctions conducted have had a charity component," he says. "But now you're starting to see artists experiment with auctions without charities, even for just a small group of seats up front. Every artist is treating it differently."
For fans on a budget, however, such auctions - which recently pushed $350 tickets for Madonna's Confessions tour up to an average of $400 to $500 - auctions won't help much. Those looking for reasonably priced tickets often wonder why artists don't simply meet demand by playing additional concerts in cities with heavy interest.
"The artists want to cover as much ground as they can and visit as many cities as they can, and most of them are not willing to go to Calgary and play three shows, if that's what it takes to meet demand," Bongiovanni says. "They'd rather play one show and charge a higher ticket price. And it's in their best interest to keep fans wanting."
Here's some more bad news for those hoping things will change in favour of the general public. Since fans are willing to pay exorbitant sums for concert tickets, artists, promoters and venues have no reason to lower prices anytime soon. And there's no indication they ever will.
"You could certainly make the argument that the concert market is not the egalitarian, music-for-the-people sentiment it used to be," Bongiovanni says. "In many cases, we've priced the average fan out of being able to sit in the best seat. We live in a supply and demand world, and you'll find that there will always be enough people willing to pay whatever money to buy whatever they want because it's available to them. Is that fair? Obviously you can make arguments both ways." (The Calgary Herald)
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